On 22 August 1662, the day before the new queen arrived at Whitehall in a barge so surrounded by craft that ‘we could see no water’, Samuel Pepys walked over to Mr Creede’s lodging and had ‘a little banquet’ (meaning fruit and sweets and wine) ‘and I had liked to have begged a parrett for my wife, but he hath put me in a way to get a better from Steventon at Portsmouth’.
By ‘I had liked to have begged’ Pepys meant ‘I would have liked to have begged’ or ‘I felt inclined to beg’. The Authorised Version, 51 years earlier, expressed Romans 1:28 as: ‘They did not like to retaine God in their knowledge’. In the New International version it says: ‘They did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God.’
The neat new Oxford Modern English Grammar by Bas Aarts (£20) includes like in a little list of verbs, mostly of wanting and hating, that can take as a direct object a clause using the infinitive: ‘I like them to do it.’ Some such verbs introduce the clause with for: ‘I yearn for them to do it.’ Some that Dr Aarts lists with for do not sound admissible to me: ‘I prefer for them to do it.’
I mention all this by way of introducing an extraordinary construction that I have heard twice in a week. ‘I like that they are doing it,’ said a woman on Radio Four. Like taking as an object a clause introduced by that is a construction that I would have thought impossible.
The way I’d express it is: ‘I like them doing it.’ If I was feeling grammatical, I’d make it: ‘I like their doing it,’ since the object of like is the verbal-noun or gerund doing, and thus the pronoun is possessive, their.
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